Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  • Actually, Nayirah had been coached by Hill and Knowlton, an American public relations firm headed by President Bush’s former chief of staff, Craig Fuller. Hill and Knowlton selected her wardrobe, wrote her a script to memorize, and rehearsed with her for hours in front of video cameras.

  DISINFORMING THE WORLD

  • “Nayirah” was just one of many media stunts that sold the war to the American people, according to “Nightline” reporter Morgan Strong in an article he wrote for TV Guide in 1992.

  A dragonfly, the fastest flying insect, can move up to 35 m.p.h.

  • A second Kuwaiti woman testified before a widely televised session of the UN while the world body was deciding whether to sanction force against Iraq. She was identified as simply another refugee. But it turns out that she was the wife of Kuwait’s minister of planning and was herself a well-known TV personality in Kuwait.

  • Strong asked a Kuwaiti exile leader why such a high-profile person was passed off as just another refugee. “Because of her professional experience,” the Kuwaiti replied, “she is more believable.” In her testimony, she indicated that her experience was firsthand. “Such stories...I personally have experienced,” she said. But when interviewed later, in Saudi Arabia, she admitted that she had no direct knowledge of the events.

  HILL AND KNOWLTON AT WORK

  • Hill and Knowlton personnel were allowed to travel unescorted through Saudi Arabia at a time when news reporters were severely restricted by the U.S. Army. The PR firm’s employees interviewed Kuwaiti refugees, looking for lurid stories and amateur videos that fit their political agenda. Kuwaitis with the most compelling tales were coached and made available to a press hamstrung by military restrictions. Happy for any stories to file, reporters rarely questioned the stories of Iraqi brutality that the refugees told them.

  • Hill and Knowlton also supplied networks with videotapes that distorted the truth. One Hill and Knowlton tape purported to show Iraqis firing on peaceful Kuwaiti demonstrators...and that’s the way the news media dutifully reported it. But the incident on tape was actually Iraqi soldiers firing back at Kuwaiti resistance fighters.

  THE TRUTH

  • Strong says: “These examples are but a few of the incidents of outright misinformation that found their way onto network news. It is an inescapable fact that much of what Americans saw on their news broadcasts, especially leading up to the Allied offensive against Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, was in large measure the contrivance of a public relations firm.”

  The double coconut palm produces the largest seeds (up to 60 lbs.) in the plant kingdom.

  THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE

  It’s as famous as UFOs, as fascinating as the Abominable Snowman, as mysterious as the lost city of Atlantis. But is it real?

  BACKGROUND

  The next time you’re looking at a map of the world, trace your finger from Key West, Florida, to Puerto Rico; from Puerto Rico to the island of Bermuda; and from there back to Florida. The 140,000-square-mile patch of ocean you’ve just outlined is the Bermuda Triangle. In the past 50 years, more than 100 ships and planes have disappeared there. That may sound like a lot, but it’s actually about standard for a busy stretch of ocean.

  “Besides,” says Larry Kuche, author of The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved, “hundreds of planes and ships pass safely through the so-called triangle every day....It is no more logical to try to find a common cause for all the disappearances in the triangle than to try to find one cause for all the automobile accidents in Arizona.”

  Experts agree that the only real mystery about the Bermuda Triangle is why everyone thinks it’s so mysterious.

  THE DISAPPEARANCE THAT STARTED IT ALL

  The “Lost Squadron.” On December 15, 1945, Flight 19, a group of five U.S. Navy Avenger planes carrying 14 men, took off from the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station at 2 p.m. for a three-hour training mission off the Florida coast. Everything went well until about 3:40 p.m., when Lt. Charles C. Taylor, the leader of Flight 19, radioed back to Fort Lauderdale that both of his compasses had malfunctioned and that he was lost. “I am over land, but it’s broken,” he reported to base. “I am sure I’m in the Keys, but I don’t know how far down and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.” Shortly afterward he broke in with an eerier transmission: “We cannot see land....We can’t be sure of any direction—even the ocean doesn’t look as it should.”

  Over the next few hours, the tower heard numerous static-filled transmissions between the five planes. The last transmission came at 6:00 p.m., when a Coast Guard plane heard Taylor radio his colleagues: “All planes close up tight...will have to ditch unless land-fall. When the first plane drops to 10 gallons we all go down together.” That was his last transmission—that evening all five planes disappeared without a trace.

  Half of all Americans who visit psychiatrists are between the ages of 25 and 44.

  A few hours later, a search plane with a crew of 13 took off for the last reported position of the flight...and was never seen again. No wreckage or oil slick from any of the planes was ever found, prompting the Naval Board of Inquiry to observe that the planes “had disappeared as if they had flown to Mars.”

  A MYTH IS BORN

  The Lost Squadron would probably be forgotten today if it hadn’t been for a single news story published on September 16, 1950. An Associated Press reporter named E. V. W. Jones decided to occupy his time on a slow day by writing a story about the Lost Squadron and other ships and planes that had disappeared into the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast.

  Dozens of newspapers around the country picked it up...and for some reason, it captured people’s imaginations. Over the next few years the story was reprinted in tabloids, pulp magazines, pseudoscience journals, and “unexplained mysteries” books.

  IT GETS A NAME

  In 1964, Vincent Gaddis, another journalist, gave the story its name. He wrote an article in Argosy magazine called “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle” and listed dozens of ships that had disappeared there over the centuries, starting with the Rosalie (which disappeared in 1840) and ending with the yacht Conne-mara IV (which vanished in 1956). He also offered an explanation for the disappearances, speculating that they were caused by “space-time continua [that] may exist around us on the earth, inter-penetrating our known world,” a pseudo-scientific way of suggesting that the planes and ships had disappeared into a third dimension.

  Interest in the Bermuda Triangle hit a high point in 1974, when Charles Berlitz (grandson of the founder of Berlitz language schools) authored The Bermuda Triangle: An Incredible Saga of Unexplained Disappearances. Without presenting a shred of real evidence, he suggested the disappearances were caused by electromagnetic impulses generated by a 400-foot-tall pyramid at the bottom of the ocean. The book shot to the top of the bestseller list, inspiring scores of copycat books, TV specials, and movies that kept the Bermuda Triangle myth alive for another generation.

  Q: What do Cleopatra and John Wilkes Booth have in common?

  DEBUNKING THE MYTH

  Is there anything to the Bermuda Triangle theory? The U.S. government doesn’t think so—the Coast Guard doesn’t even bother to keep complete statistics on the incidents there and attributes the disappearances to the strong currents and violent weather patterns.

  In 1985 an air-traffic controller named John Myhre came up with a plausible theory about the Lost Squadron’s strange fate. A few years earlier he had been flipping through a book on the subject, when he came across a more complete record of the last radio communications between the five planes. Myhre was a pilot and had logged many hours flying off the coast of Florida. “When I ran across a more accurate version of Taylor’s last transmissions,” Myhre recounts, “I realized what had happened....The lead plane radioed that he was lost over the Florida Keys. Then he said he was over a single island and there was no land visible in any direction.” Myhre believes the island Lt. Taylor reported “had to be Walker’s Cay,” an island that is not part of
the Florida Keys:

  I’ve flown over it dozens of times and it’s the only one of the hundreds of islands around Florida that’s by itself out of sight of other land. And it’s northwest of the Abacos, which, in fact, look very much like the Keys when you fly over them. Clearly if he thought he was in the Keys, he thought he could reach mainland by flying northeast. But if he was in the Abacos, a northeast course would just take him farther over the ocean.

  MOVIE NOTE

  The original Lost Squadron story became so embellished with new “facts” (Taylor’s last words were reported to have been “I know where I am now...Don’t come after me!...They look like they’re from outer space!”), that filmmaker Steven Spielberg included the Lost Squadron in a scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The crew reappears on board the mother spaceship after being missing in action for decades.

  A: Nobody knows where they’re buried.

  NO RESPECT

  Words to forget from comedian Rodney Dangerfield.

  “We sleep in separate rooms, we have dinner apart, we take separate vacations—we’re doing everything we can to keep our marriage together.”

  “I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous—everyone hasn’t met me yet.”

  “If it weren’t for pickpockets, I’d have no sex life at all.”

  “She was so old, when she went to school they didn’t have history.”

  “I once asked my father if things were bad for him during the Depression. He said the first six months were bad, then he got used to me.”

  “My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.”

  “It’s a good thing you’re wearing a mustache. It breaks up the monotony of your face.”

  “I don’t get no respect. No respect at all. Every time I get into an elevator the operator says the same thing: ‘Basement?’ No respect. When I was a kid we played hide-and-seek. They wouldn’t even look for me. The other day I was standing in front of a big apartment house. The doorman asked me to get him a cab....I bought a used car—I found my wife’s dress in the back seat.”

  “Last week I told my wife a man is like wine, he gets better with age. She locked me in the cellar.”

  “My wife’s an Earth sign. I’m a water sign. Together we make mud.”

  “Always look out for Number One and be careful not to step in Number Two.”

  “I drink too much. Last time I gave a urine sample there was an olive in it.”

  “I broke up with my psychiatrist. I told him I had suicidal tendencies. He told me from now on I had to pay in advance.”

  There are more than 35 million ex-smokers in the U.S.

  INCOMPETENT

  CRIMINALS

  A lot of Americans are worried about the growing threat of crime. Well, the good news is that there are plenty of crooks who are their own worst enemies. Here are a few true-life examples.

  ARE WE HIGH YET?

  When Nathan Radlich’s house was burgled on June 4, 1993, thieves left his TV, his VCR, and even his watch. All they took was a “generic white cardboard box” of grayish white powder. A police spokesman said it looked similar to cocaine. “They probably thought they scored big,” he mused.

  The powder was actually the cremated remains of Radlich’s sister, Gertrude, who had died three years earlier.

  —From the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  POOR PENMANSHIP

  In 1992, 79-year-old Albert Goldsband walked into a San Bernardino, California, bank and handed the teller a note demanding money. When she couldn’t read the note, he pulled out a toy gun. But the teller had already taken the note to her supervisor for help deciphering it.

  Goldsband panicked and fled...to a nearby restaurant that was frequented by police officers. He was arrested immediately.

  —From the San Francisco Chronicle

  STUCK ON GLUE

  RIO DE JANEIRO—Nov. 5, 1993. “A thief was found stuck to the floor of a factory Thursday after trying to steal glue in Belo Horizonte, 280 miles north of Rio, newspapers reported.

  “Edilber Guimaeares, 19, stopped to sniff some of the glue he was stealing when two large cans fell to the floor, spilling over.

  “When police were called Thursday morning, Guimaeares was glued to the floor, asleep.”

  —From the San Francisco Examiner

  Sevent-three percent of women say they’d rather be “brilliant but plain” than “sexy but dumb.”

  MISTAKEN IDENTITY

  “Warren Gillen, 26, was arrested for trying to rob a bank in Glasgow. Police put him in a lineup, but no one identified him. He was booked anyway after calling out from the lineup, ‘Hey, don’t you recognize me?’”

  —From More News of the Weird

  A CASE OF NERVES?

  Lee W. Womble, 28, was spotted and picked up a few minutes after robbing the Lafayette Bank in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

  Police said that even if they hadn’t seen him, he would have been easy to identify; he had written his name on the note he handed the teller demanding money.

  “He wrote his name on it twice—once on top of the other,” said police. “He could have been trying to kill time. He could have been nervous or something. Who knows?”

  —From the Oakland Tribune

  WRONG TURN

  “An alleged drunk driver who led police on a wild midnight chase landed in jail even before his arrest. His car crashed into the jail building.

  “He didn’t have too far to go from there,’ said Police Capt. Mike Lanam. ‘It was like a drive-up window.’”

  —From the Chicago Tribune

  EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY

  “A man accused of stealing a car was easy to track, police said, especially after they found his resume under one of the seats.

  “Police discovered the handwritten resume when they looked through the stolen 1985 Chevrolet Celebrity they had recovered.

  “Police then telephoned an employer listed on the resume for a different sort of reference.”

  —From the Associated Press

  People with heart disease are 2.3 times more likely to have a heart attack when they’re angry.

  MONTHS OF THE YEAR

  Here’s where the names of the months come from.

  JANUARY. Named for the Roman god Janus, a two-faced god who “opened the gates of heaven to let out the morning, and closed them at dusk.” Janus was worshiped as the god of all doors, gates, and other entrances. Consequently, the opening month of the year was named after him.

  FEBRUARY. The Roman “Month of Purification” got its name from februarius, the Latin word for purification. February 15 was set aside for the Festival of Februa, in which people repented and made sacrifices to the gods to atone for their wrongdoings.

  MARCH. Named for Mars, the Roman god of war. The Roman empire placed great emphasis on wars and conquest, so until 46 B.C. this was the first month of the year.

  APRIL. No one knows the origin of the name. One theory: it comes from Aprilis or aphrilis, which are corruptions of Aphrodite, the Greek name for Venus, the goddess of love. However, many experts think the month is named after the Latin verb aperire, which means “to open.” (Most plants open their leaves and buds in April.)

  MAY. Some people think the month is named after Maia, the mother of the god Mercury; other people think it was named in honor of the Majores, the older branch of the Roman Senate.

  JUNE. It may have been named in honor of Juno, the wife of Jupiter; or it may have been named after the Juniores, the lower branch of the Roman Senate.

  JULY. Named after Julius Caesar.

  AUGUST. Named after Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, heir and nephew of Julius Caesar. The Roman Senate gave this Caesar the title of “Augustus,” which means “revered,” and honored him further by naming a month after him.

  It took Einstein five weeks to write his Theory of Relativity.

  SEPTEMBER. Comes from the Latin word septem, which means “seven.” September was the
seventh month until about the year 700 B.C., when Numa Pompilius, the second Roman king, switched from a 304-day calendar to a 355-day lunar calendar.

  OCTOBER. From octo, the Latin word for “eight.” When Romans changed the calendar, they knew October was no longer the eighth month, and tried to rename it. Some candidates: Germanicus (after a general), Antonius (an emperor), Faustina (the emperor’s wife), and Herculeus (after Emperor Commodus, who had nicknamed himself the “Roman Hercules.”) None of the new names stuck.

  NOVEMBER. From novem, the Latin word for “nine.” November was also referred to as “blood-month.” Reason: It was the peak season for pagan animal sacrifices.

  DECEMBER. From decem, the Latin word for “ten.” Attempts to rename it Amazonius in honor of the mistress of Emperor Commodius failed.

  DAYS OF THE WEEK

  When Anglo-Saxons invaded the British Isles, they brought their language and pagan gods with them. The names of the days of the week are a legacy.

  SUNDAY. Originally called Sunnan daeg, which, like today, meant “sun day.”

  MONDAY. Originally called Monan daeg, “moon day.”

  TUESDAY. Tiwes daeg was named in honor of Tiw, the Anglo-Saxon and Norse god of war.

  WEDNESDAY. Named Wodnes daeg and dedicated to Woden, the king of the gods in Valhalla.

  THURSDAY. Thu(n)res daeg commemorated Thor, the god of thunder, and the strongest and bravest god of them all.

  FRIDAY. Originally named Frige daeg after Thor’s mother Frigga, the most important goddess in Valhala. (That’s one theory; the day may be also named after Freyja, the Norse goddess of love.)

  SATURDAY. Named Saeter daeg in honor of Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture. It’s the one day of the week whose name isn’t derived from Anglo-Saxon/Norse myths.

  Among other things, the ancient Greeks invented counterfeiting.

  THE JEEP STORY